KIRKUS REVIEW

An audaciously imagined alternate history of the invention of
the computer—in 19th-century Victorian England.

This graphic novel, written and illustrated by an artist and
computer animator, begins with a sliver of fact—the brief, apparently
unproductive “intellectual partnership” between Ada Lovelace and Charles
Babbage. She was 18 when they met, the daughter of Lord Byron, steered toward
mathematics and science in order to avoid the irrationality and even madness of
poetry and, in her words from the novel, “redeem my father’s irrational
legacy.” He was a 42-year-old mathematics professor, “a super-genius inventor”
according to the narrative, committed to developing “the radical non-human
calculating machine.” “In a sense the stubborn, rigid Babbage and mercurial,
airy Lovelace embody the division between hardware and software,” explains one
of the voluminous footnotes (and endnotes) that take even more space than the graphic
narrative. The historical version, such as it is, takes less than a tenth of
the book, ending with Lovelace’s death from cancer at age 36, having written
only one paper, while Babbage “never did finish any of his calculating
machines. He died at seventy-nine, a bitter man. The first computers were not
built until the 1940s.” Yet the historical account merely serves as a launching
pad for the narrative’s alternative history, as the “multiverse” finds the
development of oversized, steam-driven computers, with huge gears and IBM-style
punch cards. The “Difference Engine” that Babbage conceived and Lovelace
documented was initially championed by Queen Victoria, and Padua develops an
account that encompasses the literary development of Samuel Coleridge, Charles
Dickens, George Eliot and Lewis Carroll. Like Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, readers can get lost in the explosion of imagery and
overwhelming notes that document the history that never was.

A prodigious feat of historically based fantasy that engages on
a number of levels.

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